Reclaiming your head

Here’s a great listen for you – Julia Sweeney on Fresh Air. She’s got a one-woman show called ‘Letting Go of God’ at an off-off-Broadway theater, and she gives a pretty good run-through of the journey from theism to atheism in this interview. In fact it’s pretty hilarious what a lot she manages to get into thirty minutes or so – religion as consolation in despair, Bible study, Abraham and Isaac, perverse excuses for Abraham and Isaac, a wink-wink priest who explains that we sophisticated believers know better but myths are for the people, the anger and sense of treachery at being told that, withdrawal from the church, turn to New Age, in particular Deepak Chopra, being stimulated by his talk of quantum mechanics, which he cites to subvert science but she didn’t realize that at the time, reading about quantum mechanics because of Chopra-stimulus, being excited by science and the scientific way of thinking, seeing everything through that filter, that skeptical filter – that’s about the first five minutes. It’s good stuff.

There’s one bit where she talks about the way she used to have God in her head; she would talk to him, tell him about her problems, discuss things – he was very compassionate about my problems, she says with a cackle. So, Terri Gross asked, wasn’t it lonely when you didn’t have God in your head any more? I answered for Sweeney: maybe, but also freeing. Sweeney said yes but it was also liberating.

That’s exactly it, you see. It’s liberating. I think people underestimate that – people who emphasize the consolation of religion. It is consoling, of course I see that, but it is also – something the absence of which is liberating. It’s surveillance. The constant presence of someone you take to be real inside your head is (can be) consoling and companionable but it’s also relentless. Sweeney talked with some passion about realizing that her thoughts were her own, that what went on inside her head belonged to her and no one else. Well exactly.

And she explained, with some eloquence, how she finds skepticism and an interest in science themselves actually consoling. A great listen.

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5 Responses to “Reclaiming your head”

I’ve seen Julia Sweeney’s show several times, and it’s amazing – funny and thought-provoking. She wrote the forward to Robert Price’s “The Reason Driven Life” (a rebuttal to Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life”) and what you write here about “God in the head” reminds me of a similar view he wrote about in his book that suffers from the same sort of problem as thinking God knows every thought: the belief that “everything happens for a reason.”

You see, there are no accidents, because there’s a plan. All the small events which occur throughout your day – and all the major crises and changes – might really be secret signs and clues which have been placed there to help you onto the path of knowing the right thing to do and becoming a better, wiser, more spiritual person. Life is a sort of divine charades where God or Spirit or the Cosmos or Whatever pantomimes out signals you’re supposed to decipher and follow. Whether it’s a parking space, a sprained ankle, a billboard, or coincidences which are supposed to “confirm” some interconnected meaning, everything has to be scrutinized. I’ve known people who weren’t even Christian who seemed to believe this, at least some of the time.

If you interpret a “special meaning” and it turns out all wrong, that’s your own fault. How “arrogant” to think you can know the mind of God. But better not stop trying, because what if God sends you a message later and you ignore it? That would be arrogant, too. It’s a double bind. Price writes about how liberating it is to finally realize that no, most things “just happen” because they happen, though chance, and the universe is not a story about you, and the events in your life are not some lovingly planned elaborate test designed to nudge you onto the right path.

At one point in my own life I started to try thinking this way – there’s a lot of cultural expectations that one ought to in order to be a “deep” kind of person, looking below the surface of events to find meaning — but I gave it up. Very liberating. And yes, among other things, it was a relief to lose the belief that accidents and illnesses were being sent from above to “teach me a lesson.”